Podcast Episode 18: Dana Lawson, VP Engineering at GitHub
02. September 2019
Dana explains in this episode how the US Military brought her into tech, what the definition of a VP Engineering is and how GitHub prioritizes feature requests by it’s paying and non paying customers.
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About the podcast
Digitale Leute Insights is the podcast for passionate product people. We interview product developers from around the world and take a closer look at their tools and tactics.
Host: Oliver Thylmann
In this episode, you will learn:
- About Dana’s tech career, especially how she started in the US Military around the turn of the millennium in an all-female team [00:01:41]
- Definition of the role of a VP Engineering. [00:12:42]
- How to manage the reliability of Githubs services on the one hand and being able to try out new stuff on the other. [00:20:21]
- Who fixes features when they break. [00:23:31]
- How Github prioritize feature development. Do feature requests from paying customers receive a different treatment than those from free users? [00:28:34]
- What the road map for Github is. [00:32:28]
- What trends Dana sees coming for the industry at the moment. [00:35:41]
- Why new technologies don’t make companies smaller yet. [00:38:10]
- How Github feels after being acquired by Microsoft. [00:42:27]
- How to switch off in a remote setting with a global workforce. [00:44:23]
- Why „The Power of Habit“ by Charles Duhigg is Dana’s book of the year. [00:47:34]
LinkedIn: Dana Lawson
About the Host:
Oliver is a serial entrepreneur based in Cologne, Germany. He is the co-founder of Giant Swarm, a 30-person SaaS company providing managed microservice infrastructure to big enterprises.
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